Whips and Cuffs…

I have always had an intense love for the bush. For many reasons but, mostly, because that is where I see the bigger picture. I see the connections, I see the simple wonder. I see what I often forget about our beautiful country-continent-world… People come, people go, but the mountains still remain.

A quote from a Juluka song.

My most intense nature experience was a week long land survival as part of my training as a pilot in the SA Airforce. At the time we were fighting a war north of our borders and the chances of getting shot down and having to survive out in the African bush were very real. And so it was important that the land survival training was just as real.

Besides the normal surviving off the land, eating grubs and berries, we also went through a simulated scenario of being captured. And interrogated.

Unfortunately the being captured part was not as childhood “cowboy and crooks” as it sounded. It included almost 20 hours of interogation and started shortly after midnight on a bitterly cold evening in July. We were overpowered by a squad of paratroopers, brought in specifically for the day. We ended up being stripped, handcuffed to each other, blindfolded and dragged through a kilometer of Lantana, overhanging Acacia thorn and Termite heaps baked hard by the African sun and hungry for the skin of exposed shins and kneecaps.

We eventually ended up, bleeding and disorientated, in a large field where we were made to sit in five long lines with our legs stretched out in front of us and our hands cuffed behind our backs.  The five metres that separated each of us from our nearest mate was almost far enough to not hear the teeth-chattering of the continuous shiver, but close enough to hear the shallow breathing of absolute fear. For eight hours our interrogators would walk up and down the line with buckets filled with ice cold water and slowly drip the water onto each of us in turn. That sound of the approaching bucket and the absolute fear it provoked will haunt me forever.

Later, once the sun was out, we were each taken in turn and thrown into a mud pit so that our mud clad bodies would be protected from the searing rays of the sun. But, where we thought this might bring some relief, we would soon find out that the ripping off of hardened mud from our hair-covered nipples would prove as equally painful as the water treatment suffered through the night.

Sadly, though, all of this was just the side show to the real interrogation and our introduction to a guy we called Freddie Kruger.

Freddie stood before each of us in turn and, armed with a stick, he would drag us up into a standing position and then bombard us with a whole lot of questions while whipping us lightly across the chest. Once he moved on his minions would push us back down and rain in the kicks with their combat boots. And then the water buckets returned.

That was just the start… Freddie came back two hours later.

Each of us got dragged off in turn towards the mud pit once again. We were smothered with a wet cloth, beaten with a rubber hose, dunked face first into the mud and asked another barrage of questions. The answers didn’t matter. The only test was to see how long we could last. It was a test of our endurance. An affirmation that the human mind can outlast the human body if it really had to.

And, somehow, our bodies survived and the bruises faded and our minds survived and got stronger.

We’ve moved on.

But the mountains still remain.

~ by Norm on February 8, 2011.